Clarence Bruce, 3rd Baron Aberdare

Clarence Napier Bruce, 3rd Baron Aberdare, GBE (2 August 1885 – 4 October 1957) was a British military officer, cricketer, tennis player, and also an excellent golfer.

Bruce received his education at Winchester College and at New College, Oxford, and was admitted as a barrister into Inner Temple; however, when World War I broke out, he decided to enter the British Army.

Lord Aberdare, who would rise to the substantive rank of captain (and would become an honorary colonel) in World War I, served variously in the Glamorgan Yeomanry, the 2nd Life Guards, the headquarters of the 61st (2nd South Midland) Division and in the Guards MG Regiment; in 1919, immediately after the armistice, he was promoted to captain. He served as the honorary colonel of the 77 (later 282) (Welsh) Heavy AA Brigade, RA from 1930 to 1952; during this period, he additionally served as major of the 11th Battalion, Surrey Home Guards during World War II. Between the two world wars, he was an active tennis player. Bruce was U.S.A. Amateur Champion in 1930 and of the British Isles in 1932 and 1938. He played eighteen times for Great Britain in the Bathurst Cup and six times won the Coupe de Paris. He carried off the M.C.C. Gold Prize on five occasions and nine times won the Silver Prize.^[1]

Simultaneously, Aberdare played an active role in the organisation of the Olympics; he served on the International Olympic Committee, and on the organising committee of the 1948 Summer Olympics in London. He served in many physical education and sportsmen's clubs, and was also be a member of the New College Society. In 1948, he was created a Knight of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, and a Commander of the British Empire a year later. In 1954, he was additionally created a Knight Grand Cross of the British Empire.

His death was caused by drowning after his car fell over a precipice in Yugoslavia into three feet of water in a river bed on 4 October 1957 at the age of 72^[2].

Clarence Napier Bruce's memorial at Aberffrwd cemetery in Mountain Ash, Wales.

References

External reading

• Ed. Charles Mosley. Burke's Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage. Copyright 2003; Burke's Peerage and Gentry: Wilmington, Delaware.